1. Technical Field
This invention relates to a system and process for treating electronic mail addresses in both the preview pane and full message window of an electronic mail program as objects.
2. Background Art
Mail programs currently resolve email addresses into friendly names and verify that they are—or are likely to be—valid email addresses by checking them against a local or server-based database. For example, a user enters joez554q57@hotmail.com in a mail message and the software changes it to “Joe Smith” based on a comparison against the user's entry for Joe Smith in the user's address book, a reference section listing email-addresses and individual's names in an email program. Likewise, the look up could be in a shared corporate database or one hosted by an Internet service. Although users of electronic mail systems typically have a number of email messages in their email inbox or have other sources of data in their electronic mail store that have email addresses (sent items folder or other folders), these users do not take advantage of the address book associated with their email. Data entry of the long strings of characters and numbers that make up most electronic mail addresses is time consuming and tedious. Therefore, most computer users do not take the time to enter the contact data into the address book. As a result, the mail program being utilized cannot resolve received email addresses into their friendly name and validate the associated address.
As a result of an unpopulated address book, the sender most often must type in the email address or addresses when composing the message in order to successfully send the message to the intended recipient or recipients. Depending on the number of intended recipients and the length of their email addresses this could require many keystrokes and mouse clicks and become a very time-consuming and cumbersome process. Additionally, it is easy for the sender to inadvertently enter a wrong character resulting in an incorrect email address and thus preventing the email from reaching its intended destination when the email is sent. Many times this error will not be obvious at the time the sender sends the email and as a result a significant time could pass before the sender realizes his error. Since one of the primary advantages of email is its speed of transferring information this delay is a significant drawback.